ExhiBIT_Next

ExhiBIT_Next is a 24-month Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership in adult education that repositions museums and archives as civic learning spaces for adults aged 55 and over. Building on the earlier ExhiBIT partnership, it institutionalises the “Museum of the People” — a governance model in which older adults move from cultural consumers to recognised co-curators of documented, publicly legible heritage. The project equips heritage professionals with validated competences, enables adults 55+ to generate documented heritage contributions, and integrates micro-credentials into everyday museum practice, advancing participatory governance, digital inclusion and sustainable adult learning across European heritage institutions.

The challenge
Across Europe, demographic ageing intersects with digital exclusion, social isolation and declining participation in civic and cultural life among adults over 55. Participation in adult learning falls well below the EU average for this age group, and older citizens are over-represented among those reporting no recent cultural participation. Museums and archives remain under-integrated actors within adult education systems: national strategies rarely recognise them as lifelong-learning infrastructures, and professionals report gaps in adult pedagogy, inclusive practice, digital mediation and the recognition of non-formal learning. Later-life knowledge and memory therefore remain largely private, with weak pathways for structured learning and public recognition.

What the project does
ExhiBIT_Next operationalises co-participation, co-curation and collective memory as a structured adult learning pathway. Adults 55+ join facilitated cohorts in museums and archives, contribute lived experience, family traces and place-based knowledge, and — through documentation labs and guided storytelling — see their recollections situated within broader social histories such as migration, labour, craft and neighbourhood change. An upgraded ExhiBIT_Next application supports story capture, metadata entry, consent management and curatorial review, with accessibility features for low-literacy, Deaf, blind, neurodivergent and displaced participants. In parallel, museum and archive professionals develop competences in participatory facilitation, cultural-memory mediation, inclusion and citizen documentation through a dedicated Virtual Learning Lab, earning stackable, EU-aligned micro-credentials. The methodology is tested in real conditions across six institutions in Cyprus, Italy and Croatia and consolidated into a transferable European model.

What the project will deliver
ExhiBIT_Next will produce a validated Museum of the People Framework and a Citizen Documentation and Consent Protocol; an upgraded ExhiBIT_Next application functioning as a living community archive; an Adult Museum Educator Competence Framework with an EU-compliant micro-credential architecture; Educator and Adult Virtual Learning Labs with simulations and micro-learning; four co-curated exhibitions developed with adults 55+ as co-curators; and an Exploitation and Replication Toolkit and Policy Recommendation Report to support uptake across European museums and archives. Expected outcomes include at least 100 adults 55+ engaged, 40 professionals trained, a documented corpus of community stories and digitised artefacts, and museums embedded as local lifelong-learning centres.

The partnership
ExhiBIT_Next brings together six organisations from three countries, coordinated by C.I.P. Citizens in Power (Cyprus): the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli” (Italy), the Pierides Foundation (Cyprus), the Museo civico Gaetano Filangieri (Italy), the Museum of Arts and Crafts – MUO (Croatia) and the Larnaka Archives – Fivos Stavrides (Cyprus). The consortium combines lifelong-learning and digital expertise, academic museology and observatory capacity, and a hybrid mix of foundation, civic, regional-crafts and archival institutions for authentic testing across diverse governance, demographic and socio-cultural contexts.

CIP’s role
As project coordinator and an accredited Cypriot lifelong-learning provider, Citizens in Power leads the overall management, financial administration, quality assurance and European dissemination of ExhiBIT_Next. CIP drives the technical development of the ExhiBIT_Next application and designs the Adult Museum Educator Competence Framework together with its EU-compliant, stackable micro-credential architecture. It builds the Educator and Adult Virtual Learning Labs and the simulation suite, develops the project’s inclusion and accessibility model, and manages competence assessment and micro-credential issuance. CIP commits to hosting and maintaining the project’s digital ecosystem for at least five years beyond the funded period, and connects ExhiBIT_Next to its lifelong-learning networks, its accredited training centre and its cultural-heritage partners.

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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the granting authority (IDEP – Foundation for the Management of European Lifelong Learning Programmes, Cyprus National Agency). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.